Thai Cooking Class

We read about cooking classes in Chiang Mai before coming here. My sister in law, Kelley recommended one that she had gone to a few years ago so we decided to give it a try. It was a wonderful experience! It felt like we were on the cooking channel! We took a van from our hotel about 25 minutes outside of town to a local thai market and got a tour of the market and an explanation of all ingredients that we would need. We were each given the name and quantity of two ingredients that we were supposed to purchase. It was pretty cool. 

The rice stand with more types of rice than I even knew existed

A long shot of the market- it was huge!

Buying noodles for Pad Se Ew

Then, we went to  Chef's house. He has a cooking patio all set up with individual cooking stations. First, we went into the demo kitchen to see how to make a dish, then we got to go outside to our own stations and cook it. It was so much fun.  Our first dish was Pad Se Ew - a wide style noodle, somewhat similar to Pad Thai. We proceeded to make fish, wrapped in banana leaves, with red curry, yellow curry (one of my favorite Thai dishes) and then cashew chicken. What ever we made was what we ended up eating for lunch so there was some motivation to do a good job. I must say that everything came out really good.  I hope that I can replicate any of the recipes at home for all of you- don't hold out too much hope but I did walk away with a cookbook to help! Really fun afternoon and we met some really nice people from Australia and a woman from England that shared the experience with us.

Cashew Chicken

Posing with Chef!

Lunch with our classmates

This is our kitchen classroom at Chef's house

Cooking coconut cream for our curry

What are we going to do with the rest of our day you ask?? Go back to the massage place of course- today a facial and a back and neck massage- all for $15 for 2 hours!

Ok, well we just got back from the Massage place and let me tell you, apparently Thai massage is not supposed to be relaxing. I feel like I got beat up- in a good way! You should google Thai massage to see images of the kinds of stretches and poses they do- as Janina said, you feel like you are in Cirque de Solei. So after our massages, we jumped on a Tuk Tuk to take us to the river front and had dinner at a restaurant that someone on our elephant tour recommended. It was fun, sort of touristy but decent food. When we were done we ventured over to the bar to watch the band which was playing all American cover songs from the 70's. It is always amazing to hear people singing in perfect English. Back in the room, we have to pack our bags because sadly we are leaving Chiang Mai tomorrow. Every day here was an adventure. We are off to the south of Thailand, right above Malaysia, to a beach town called Krabi. Wish us luck- it's monsoon season and the weather forecast shows thunder storms for the next week. Hope they are wrong!!